12-14. Nomadic Emigration and Its Causes and Consequences

With man-stealing was associated cattle-stealing (baranta), which finally made any attempt at cattle-rearing impossible for the systematically plundered victim, and drove him to vegetarianism without milk nourishment. And what a vegetarianism, when agriculture had to suffer from the ever-recurring raids, and from bad harvests! And where the predatory herdsman settled for the winter in the midst of an agricultural population and in his own interests allowed them a bare existence as his serfs, there came about a remarkable connexion of two strata of people different in race and, for a time, in speech also.

A typical land in this respect is Ferghana, the former Khanate of Khokand, on the southern border of the Great Kirghiz horde. The indigenous inhabitants of this country, the entirely vegetarian Tadjiks and Sarts, from immemorial times passed from the hands of one nomad people to another in the most frightful servitude. In the sweat of their brows they dug canals for irrigation, cultivated fields, and put into practice a hundred arts, only to pay the lion's share to their oppressors who, in the full consciousness of their boundless power, indulged the most bestial appetites. But the majority of the dominant horde could not turn from their innate and uncontrollable impulse to wander; in the spring they were drawn irresistibly to the free air of the high-lying steppes, and only a part of them returned to winter among the enslaved peasantry. This hopeless state of affairs continued to the Russian conquest in 1876, for the directly adjoining deserts always poured forth wild hordes afresh, who nipped in the bud any humaner intercourse of herdsmen and peasants.

For rapine and slavery were inevitable wherever the nomads of the vast steppes and deserts made their abode in the immediate neighbourhood of more civilized lands. What their own niggardly soil denied them, they took by force from the fruitful lands of their neighbours. And because the plundered husbandman could not pursue the fleet mounted nomad into the trackless desert, he remained unprotected. The fertile districts on the edge of the Sahara and the Arabian desert were also in this frightful position, and Iran felt this calamity all the harder, because the adjoining deserts of Turan are the most extensive and terrible, and their inhabitants the wildest of all the nomads of the world. No better fared the peoples inhabiting East Europe, on the western boundaries of the steppe-zone. As early as the fourth century B.C. Ephorus stated that the customs, according to the individual peoples, of the Scythians and the Sarmatians (both names covered the most medley conglomerations of nomads and peasants) were very dissimilar.

Some even ate human beings (as the Massagetae ate their sick or aged parents), others abstained from all animals. A thousand years later Pseudo-Caesarius of Nazianzus tells of a double people, that of the Sklavenes (Slavs) and Phisonites on the lower Danube, of whom the Sklavenes abstained from meat eating. And Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the year 952 stated that the Russians (Rus, North Germanic Varangians, who coming from Scandinavia held sway over the Slavs of Russia) bought horses, cattle, and sheep from their terrible nomadic neighbours the Patzinaks, because they had none of these animals themselves in the Slav lands which they dominated. In certain districts of East Europe therefore vegetarianism was permanent among the peasant folk, who for more than two thousand years had been visited by the Altaians with rapine and murder; this can be proved from original sources to have been the case from the fourth century B.C. to the tenth century A.D. — that is, for 1400 year! It is exactly the same state of things as in Ferghana in modern times.

As long as a nomad horde finds sufficient room in the steppe it does not think of emigration, and always returns home from its raids richly laden with the plunder. But if the steppe zone is thrown into a ferment by struggles for the winter pastures or by other causes, the relatively weakest horde gets pushed out of the steppe, and must conquer a new home outside the zone. For it is only weak against the remaining nomad hordes, but against any other State upon which it falls it is irresistible.

All the nomads of history who broke into Europe, the Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Magyars, Cumans, were the weakest in the steppes and had to take to flight, whence they became assailants of the world before whom the strongest States tottered. With an energetic Khan at their head, who organised them on military lines, such a horde transformed itself into an incomparable army, compelled by the instinct of self-preservation to hold fast together in the midst of the hostile population which they subjugated; for however superfluous a central government may be in the steppe, it is of vital importance to a conquering nomad horde outside it. Consequently, while that part of the people which remained in the steppe was split up into loose clan associations, the other part, which emigrated, possessed itself of immense territories, exterminated the greater part of entire nations and enslaved the rest, scattered them as far as they pleased, and founded a despotically governed State with a ridiculously small band of horsemen.

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